


Complicated

by mulders_modem



Category: Fringe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-18
Updated: 2015-12-18
Packaged: 2018-05-07 12:16:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5456249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mulders_modem/pseuds/mulders_modem
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Alts face tough news following episode 3.13 Immortality. Altlivia takes stock of her motivation and of the peril that she's faced, having returned to her universe. Something a bit different, hindsight being what it is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Complicated

**Author's Note:**

> A bittersweet drabble

It was more than guilt and less than love, Olivia thought. Neither Frank nor the secretary’s son bore distinction in her addled conscience. She had betrayed them both, and worse yet, had been fool enough to do so brazenly. 

She bowed her face into a pair of starched hospital pillows and sobbed, her mouth mutely agape. The room grew smaller around her. Behind her closed eyelids, there was only a blessed darkness.

“Liv?” Lincoln rapped his knuckles against her open door. “How’s the head?”

Olivia curtained the strands of hair from her eyes and straightened backward from the fetal position. She pressed her fingers to the base of her skull and encountered an immediate soreness there. “I can only see one of you,” Olivia reported.

“Lucky thing,” Lee replied. He moved toward her bedside nightstand and dutifully filled a glass from the adjacent pitcher.

No doubt he noted the strain in her voice. She was instantly mortified.

“Doctor says it’s a concussion, which accounts for the vomiting. Subsequent tests,” he intoned. “Indicate increasing levels of HCG in the bloodstream.”

Olivia coughed, evading a personal account of the diagnosis. Disclosure of pregnancy was a thorny endeavor, even with Fringe carte blanche. VPE meant small coffins and a living will.

She swallowed. “Tell me. Did Frank seem…pissed when he left?”

Lincoln sank into the room’s couch, his limbs loose as frostbite departed. He raked a hand through ice-damp hair. “To be fair,” he countered. “Have you ever seen anyone happy to leave a room that you’re in?”

She gave a detached nod.

“It might be a conflict of interest. He has to present an objective case for the enzyme synthesis.”

“Beetlejuice, beetlejuice….” She boosted herself against the headboard, her voice grave. She felt exhausted suddenly, and utterly used. 

“Lincoln,” she said, the words acrid in her mouth. “I’m pregnant.”

Lincoln’s eyes narrowed, bordered a sore red from from his thaw. He stood for no reason he could name. “Of course,” he said. So encompassing was his bewilderment that he congratulated himself on any syllabic response at all.

“It’s not Frank’s.”

“Do I know him? Forget it–I don’t–It’s not my-” Lincoln wavered. There was a physical sound as his shoe treads ground against the linoleum. No more Olivia, launching herself fearlessly into a mutant fray. Long and lean and wielding a gun like a mercy.

“I told you once, that post-traumatic stress is a reality for agents,” he reminded her. “Like you. Like us. And this, this pregnancy has got to be,” Lincoln insisted. “Some extension of that and I-”

A lecture she’d heard. Someone else’s memories, Olivia deduced. Olivia dragged a body backward into a bathroom. Olivia fucked Peter to distraction. Olivia brought back a souvenir.

She’d seen Lincoln, that day in the park. And she’d run where his charred image could not haunt her.

“What kind of future do you imagine for yourself in the division?” Lincoln asked. He’d returned to the constant in their shared life. 

“Working,” she replied.

“Good.”


End file.
